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Facing the Wall
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MANDUHAI MAY HAVE BEEN THE KHATUN AND BATU Mongke the khan, but by claiming the office of taishi, foreigners such as Ismayil and Beg-Arslan still had a stranglehold on Mongolia by controlling the Gobi and thereby all the trade with China. Not yet strong enough to confront them directly, Manduhai consolidated her authority north of the Gobi. Although she steadily increased her power, ever since Genghis Khan’s conquests more Mongols actually lived south of the Gobi than north. A majority of the Mongols remained loyal to Beg-Arslan and Ismayil rather than to Dayan Khan and Manduhai.
To make Dayan Khan ruler of the whole people, as promised in his title, Manduhai had to win the loyalty of the southern Mongols. Unable at this juncture to mount a military offensive across the Gobi, she chose a more sensible, but still risky, plan. For now, she would let the massive Chinese army contend with Beg-Arslan and his aggression in the hope that they might crush him. The danger, however, was that if the Chinese could not defeat him, Beg-Arslan might emerge with an even stronger claim to being the right ruler for all the Mongols.
Beg-Arslan and Ismayil turned their attention away from Mongolia because the continued crumbling of the Ming defenses presented them with new raiding opportunities. Under Beg-Arslan’s control, the southern Mongol army was gradually nibbling away at the Chinese borders, pushing back the Ming forces. Under its weak and distracted emperor, the Ming Dynasty had become an empire in retreat. Beg-Arslan sensed that he might now make his biggest conquest by challenging the Ming for command of the Gansu Corridor and thereby the doorway into China. To occupy the corridor, he needed to attack the Chinese stronghold at Yinchuan, the main city of modern Ningxia. This was the final place besieged by Genghis Khan back in 1227, and it was near here that he died. Thus, in addition to its tremendous strategic and commercial value for anyone seeking to dominate trade, the whole area had acquired deep symbolic importance in the cultural psyche of the Mongols.
If Beg-Arslan could seize this place so closely associated with the memory of Genghis Khan, he would have all the greater hold on the Mongols serving around him. Manduhai’s claim to legitimacy derived from the blood link of Dayan Khan to Genghis Khan, but if Beg-Arslan controlled such an important site, it would show that Genghis Khan and the Eternal Blue Sky supported him. Victory in battle would always surpass any other type of legitimacy. Beg-Arslan could claim the mandate of Mongol history.
Beg-Arslan’s strongholds at the Turfan and Hami oases were too far out in the desert to function as supply bases for the conquest of Ningxia and control of the Gansu Corridor. He had moved his troops much closer to his target, into a great loop in the Yellow River. The immense river, known to the Mongols as the Black River, to the Turkic people as the Green River, and to most of the world as the Huang Ho or Yellow River, begins its nearly three-thousand-mile journey toward the sea from the Kunlun Mountains in Tibet, flowing north across the Asian continent. Without an obstacle blocking its course, the river could continue northward across Mongolia and Siberia and out to the Arctic, but the giant Gobi and the massive Mongolian Plateau bar its way. The river forms a large loop before turning eastward and heading to the Pacific instead of the Arctic.
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The land enclosed by the Great Loop covers about 83, 000 square miles, or an area about the same size as the Korean Peninsula. The river provides for agriculture along its sides if irrigated, but the interior area can only support grazing. The topography consists of a plateau that rises up to an average altitude over three thousand feet.
The landscape offers steppes of dry gravel, salt lakes, and shifting sands that farmers and sedentary people found alien and hostile, but which the Mongols found inviting and comforting to their aesthetic sensibilities and beneficial to their pastoral way of life. In contrast to the incredibly hot deserts of the interior or the wet agricultural lands of the river plains, the inner loop offered land sufficiently fertile for grazing, but not appropriate for extensive agriculture. It formed a miniature Mongolia, only farther south and with a more benign climate; threateningly close to the Gansu Corridor, it was also the ideal strategic outpost for the Mongols, from where they could easily strike at the heart of Chinese civilization and commerce.
In a series of elegant battlefront reports that survive from the Ming commander Wang Yue, a clear picture of the issues emerges. He suggested a novel tactic of using trade to lure in the Mongols and then attacking them. Because it proved difficult for the Chinese soldiers to go out and find the Mongols, Wang Yue proposed that government officials should send out large supply trains whose movements could be easily monitored by the Mongols and which would pose tempting targets for their raids. Thus the Mongols could be lured in close and then attacked by the waiting military. Although the policy would not prevent Mongol raids entirely, it would discourage them “to dare to penetrate deeply. ” Wang Yue began implementation of his policy with campaigns against the Mongols in the summer of 1470 and again in 1471. Although they produced few casualties, they succeeded in heightening the tensions along the border.
After only seven months on his assignment at the frontier a rival officer, Commander Yu Zi jun, opposed Wang’s offensive strategy. Yu prepared an alternative report, hoping to prevent the Mongols from raiding the frontier settlement at Yulin by reviving an ancient, but long neglected, approach of building a wall. According to his proposal, the wall should be made stronger and larger than the walls of earlier dynasties by constructing it of earth to a height of about thirty feet. Rather than just enclosing specific populated areas, it should be erected along the top ridges of the mountains to provide maximum visibility for spotting approaching marauders and for the relay of signals from one part to another. The signaling alone allowed the creation of an unprecedented long-distance communication network, permitting information to travel faster than a horse, thereby creating the possibility for the coordination of military action along a lengthy line at a much faster rate than the attacking cavalry could facilitate.
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Yu proposed building the wall as a more humane response to the Mongol problem, and, as such, it seemed to him more appropriate for a beneficent, civilized nation such as China. The wall would prevent invasion without harming the barbarians. Then, as the Chinese literati had maintained for hundreds of years, the exposure to the complete superiority of Chinese culture would, inevitably in its own natural way, pacify and civilize the steppe warriors. Thus, unable any longer to wage war on the Chinese, the Mongols would become civilized.
The wall would cut across the base of the Great Loop that the Mongols had called the Ordos; eventually, the wall would begin and end at the Yellow River, thereby protecting the agriculturally productive lands within the loop. Yu saw no reason to allocate men and resources to defend empty land that was not productive.
The senior military officials rejected Yu’s plan as too expensive, whereupon, at the end of 1472, he wrote another report offering a cost-benefit analysis that showed how his superiors could, in the long run, save money by building the wall. The financial argument also carried a strongly implied but unstated message. The wall would prevent the soldier-farmers stationed on the border from selling their crops to the Mongols or, worse yet, deserting to the Mongols and farming for them. The desertion rates on the border had risen steadily, and the openness of the border prevented the central authorities from exercising power not merely over the steppe tribes, but also over their own soldiers. The carefully constructed wall would keep the Mongols out and keep the Chinese in. From the wall and its watchtowers, the guards could just as easily keep watch over the farming soldiers as they could the approach of potential enemies from the steppe.
Beg-Arslan’s invasion deeper into Chinese territory created a sense of fear that propelled the discussion of alternate strategies toward planning for a necessary and quick response. The immediate question was not whether to build the wall, but whether to attack and fight the Mongols or to retreat and let them have the territory they were invading.
Commander Wang waited along the frontier of the Ordos for the Mongol attack. It would come soon, but he could not predict whether they would hit him with a frontal attack on his forces or try to bypass him and raid one of the cities under his protection. Would they loot his stores in a quiet attack under cover of the frequent dust storms from the desert, or would they focus all their fury directly on him, perhaps in a night effort to kill him and thus cripple his poorly trained and poorly supplied army?
Like the lonely commanders who had guarded this remote spot for more than a thousand years before him, Commander Wang stood at the edge of an immense empire, waiting and watching for the next onslaught. He knew that, in a truly concerted struggle, his embittered and disheartened men could not stop the Mongols. All they could possibly do was send a warning to the cities and then stand their ground and die one by one, in a vain effort to slow the assault by a few days and allow the city residents to flee or to hastily improvise some protective strategy. Commander Wang and his men were no more than guard dogs whose sole function in life was to bark at the right moment and then die.
At age forty-seven, far from the family he loved and the comforts of the life he craved, Commander Wang waited. To fill his time, he wrote poems, letters, and long reports, hoping he could still be a part of civilized life by sending his words and name back to be read by someone in the city. From these words, we can see the kind of man that he was, or at least the kind of man he wished to portray to the desk-bound bureaucrats and the supernumerary courtiers who read his work back in the Forbidden City.
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In an empire where military men ranked barely above the barbarians whom they were supposed to fight, Commander Wang stood out as a misplaced mandarin, a man trained to become an official in the government hierarchy, not in the military. His assignment to oversee the military command along the border came, in part, as a result of the constant mistrust that the imperial court had in its own army of misfits, exiles, and criminals sent to guard the country. Unable to depend upon them, the court, from time to time, sent out civilian administrators to bring them into shape and keep them from joining the enemy. Wang was more of a guard over the guards than a real functionary.
Knowing that the path to advancement in the Ming military ranks derived more from their ability to use language than weapons, the officers on the front cultivated a style of literary military writing, substituting words and metaphors for victory. As another officer had written: “I braved the snow storm to attack…. I ate dry provisions, drank water found along the route, placed myself under the danger of arrow and rock, and caused myself to suffer. I traveled the desert back and forth for three thousand li, and for more than forty days. I went to bed with my armor. At that time I thought that I would not be able to survive. ” Fortunately for the author of this field report, despite failing in his military mission, he survived, managed to secure imperial favor, and lived out his old age in leisurely and comfortable retirement. After all, what cultivated official back in the comforts of Beijing could resist such a literary battle report?
But Wang liked being seen as a man of action, and he knew the value of a well-placed dramatic gesture. When he first appeared at court in 1463, he could not stand the long sleeves that covered the hands and impaired movement; so in a potentially serious breach of court etiquette, he cut down his sleeves to allow his hands to move.
Fortunately, the emperor approved of his innovative style, thereby saving him from the ever-vigilant eunuchs and their efforts to keep the young mandarins under control.
When he found himself stationed in the Ordos near the border with the Mongols, his tactical abilities and his military talents became more obvious as he found success in repeated skirmishes with the raiding tribes. In due time, the court relieved him of all his administrative civilian duties so that he could concentrate exclusively on the military ones.
By February 1472, Commander Wang controlled approximately 40, 000 soldiers and territory covering three hundred miles of border in the Great Loop of the Yellow River. Yet a detachment of Mongols, probably under the command of Beg-Arlsan, attacked in a raid that decisively defeated Wang’s poorly trained army. After the defeat, the court in Beijing summoned Commander Wang to the capital for a high-level discussion of how to deal with the Mongol threat in the Great Loop. They wanted the tribes pushed entirely from the Ordos area and forced north of the Yellow River.
At the meeting, Wang became trapped between the demands of his superiors and the reality of the troops and resources at his disposal. Commander Wang knew clearly that to defeat the Mongols, he needed an army of 150, 000—at least three and possibly four times the size of the one that he had. Yet it would be difficult to supply such a large army in an inhospitable and infertile frontier zone.
Wang devised a new strategy. He lacked the soldiers to defend the border he had, and he lacked the soldiers to pursue the Mongols, defeat them, and expel them from the Great Loop. It was his tactical ability, however, that his superiors had counted on when they placed him in charge. He could find a way when they had not.
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His chance came in the autumn of 1473, when Beg-Arslan launched the surprise attack on Ningxia to the south. Commander Wang knew he could not catch up with the Mongols, since by the time he arrived at one ravaged city, the invaders would already be looting another. However, he had decided that if he could not defeat them on the battlefield, he would strike at their civilian camp, where the raiding warriors had left their families and animals in presumed security. If he could not force the Mongol army out of China, he knew how to make them want to leave.
Commander Wang sent out reconnaissance missions into the deserts of the Great Loop. In October he received word that his spies had located Beg-Arslan’s Mongol base camp where the army had left their families near the Red Salt Lake.
From their perceived safety by the lake, the families could wait out the winter while their men raided one settlement after another and sent back the looted goods to the encampment. Late in the winter, while the Yellow River remained firmly frozen, the army would return across the ice into safe territory, where they could graze their animals and tend their flocks during the spring and summer before returning the following fall to resume the cycle of winter raids.
Knowing that the Mongols did not expect him to mount more than a token defense, Commander Wang abandoned the prior policy of waiting passively; he set out after the civilian camp. Wang Yue headed out with ten units of 1, 000 cavalrymen in each. They marched some sixty miles in two days and nights, and when they neared the camp, the ten military units divided into two large pincers, surrounding the civilians. An effective strategy used by Ming forces in earlier fights with the Mongols involved trapping them along a river or lake that prevented their fleeing. Unable to swim, the Mongols could either die by drowning or by slaughter at the hands of the attackers.
The camp probably had the protection of a small guard, but Mongols depended less on military strength in such cases than on the ability of women, children, and animals to flee quickly. Normally, the Mongol guard set up stations some distance from the camp, and from this advance position they could see the dust of the approaching army, hear it, or simply feel the vibrations in the ground long before it came into the range of ears or eyes. Once alarmed, one of the sentries took responsibility to race back toward the camp and sound the warning to flee, while the remaining guard then attacked the invaders in a delaying ploy to give the others more time to escape. This October attack by Wang Yue’s army, however, came during one of the windiest times of the year. The autumn winds sometimes whip across northern Asia, and as they cross the Gobi, they pick up huge quantities of sand and dust.
Just such a storm formed as the Chinese crossed the desert toward the Red Salt Lake. Initially, the Chinese warriors became distressed and nervous with the bad luck of the storm in a hostile and alien environment they already feared. One of them, however, suggested that they could use the storm as a cover while they continued their advance. Wang Yue rewarded the man for his ingenuity and bravery, and he ordered his army forward.
They struck the Mongol camp without warning from both sides. According to Wang Yue’s account, his men killed or captured 350 Mongols, mostly women and children. They looted the camp, herded up the animals, and torched the gers. Invigorated by their victory over the civilians, the soldiers sought another opportunity to attack. Wang Yue suspected that the Mongol army would soon receive word of the massacre and race back to find whoever in the camp might have escaped or, if possible, to rescue the captives. He set up an ambush and waited. As suspected, the Mongol soldiers came in pursuit of the Chinese attackers, and Wang Yue’s army fell on them, managing to retake much of their loot but with few casualties on either side. Although it was not an important strategic battle, the Mongols suffered a profound emotional loss.
At least in the short term, attacking the civilian camp produced the desired impact on the Mongols. As Wang proudly reported, “When the unfortunate Mongols learned of the massacre of their wives and children they fled with tears in their eyes and for a long time afterwards did not show up in Ho-t’ao. ”
The few Mongols who managed to escape fled the area, and Beg-Arslan was forced to retreat with his Mongol warriors from the Great Loop; they crossed back across the Yellow River and temporarily disappeared back into the unknown wastes from whence they came. The defeat of the Mongols and the massacre in the Ordos achieved the Ming court’s short-term goal of driving the Mongols back north of the Yellow River, but it did not extinguish the Mongol desire and determination to take and reoccupy their former territory. The retaking of the pasturelands south of Gobi became the primary objective of the Mongols under Beg-Arslan, and control of the Ordos ranked as the most important objective toward that goal. Like a wolf retreating into the brush or finding a cave to lick its wounds, the Mongols had left, but they certainly would return.
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In the meantime, Commander Wang had become a hero, and a triumphant excitement surged through the court in the Forbidden City. He had achieved the first Chinese rout of the Mongols since Esen’s military capture of the emperor in 1449. Rather than detracting from the conquest, the clever ruse by which Wang had won the victory only added to his credit, since it cost so little money and was accomplished with so few troops. Commander Wang had fulfilled his superiors’ hopes for him when they had counted on his tactical cleverness to drive out the Mongols.
The Chinese military reports categorized the Mongol casualties together according to age and sex but gave no names or individual information. By contrast, the Mongol chronicles, as they almost always did with a horrendous or shameful loss, ignored the massacre with no mention at all. The Mongols never record the names of the fallen in cases such as these.
The Ming court lacked the will or the means to follow up on the victory in the desert. The Mongols withdrew, and the Chinese army could have retaken and occupied the entire Ordos. They could have crossed the Yellow River and driven the Mongols back up onto the Mongolian Plateau and north of the Gobi. Instead, the Ming forces abandoned offensive strategies and turned to the older defensive mode of rebuilding the wall.
For Manduhai Khatun, the encouraging news of the Chinese victory offered only limited grounds for optimism. The Ming commander had stopped the advance of Beg-Arslan and Ismayil, but he had not killed them. The civilian massacre at Red Salt Lake forced the Mongol army farther back, but Beg-Arslan had lost few soldiers. In some ways he now posed a greater threat to Manduhai than before the defeat.
Despite the Chinese victory, the Ming court recognized that the expulsion of the Mongols from the Ordos would offer no more than a temporary abatement of the struggle. Knowing the reprieve would probably be brief, the Ming officials needed to make a long-term decision.
Lacking an alternative plan of action for a permanent solution, the central government finally acquiesced to Yu’s request to build a wall. Rather than wait for the autumn, both Wang and Yu were ordered to begin building different parts of it simultaneously. Yu began immediately in the spring of 1474 with a building corps of forty thousand men. Despite the uncertainty about the stability of structures erected along the highest ridges, Yu built the wall precisely as he had proposed it, stretching out approximately 600 miles or 1, 770 li. The total cost exceeded a million taels of silver, more than 1. 7 million ounces. The final wall consisted of approximately eight hundred connected units of forts and beacon or sentry towers. It had a tower or other fortification about every three-quarters of a mile along the connecting wall.
Wang built his part of the wall farther to the west, and it stretched 387 li, or 125 miles. Together, however, the two walls created an impressive barrier. Although the two commanders saw these fortifications as temporary measures until the Mongols could be pacified and peace imposed, they had initiated a major change in Ming military policy that would take more than a century to unfold. For the time being, however, the long-term effectiveness remained difficult to ascertain.
As the wall neared completion, both men received transfers. In 1474 Wang Yue was called to work in Beijing, and in the following year Yu Zijun received a new assignment and remained in public service almost until his death in 1489. During this time, he continued the building of walls and defensive measures for the empire. He applied his engineering skills to the design of only one offensive creation—a large war chariot that could carry ten armed warriors at once. This forerunner of a tank or an armored personnel carrier proved too expensive and unusual, however, and never played a major role in steppe warfare.
The building of the Great Wall posed a problem for Manduhai’s strategy of waiting out the struggle in hopes that the Chinese would crush her rivals. The decision to build it meant that the Ming court had given up hope of chasing down the Mongol warlords. Instead, the court had marked a new defensive line and in effect surrendered everything beyond it to them. The Chinese had defeated Beg-Arslan and driven him away from the border, but Manduhai would have to deal with him without their assistance.
By 1475, when Wang Yue came to serve in the court, the emperor had entered the eleventh year of his reign, and he had not been able to produce a viable heir with Lady Wan or any other woman in his household. He was not yet thirty, but Lady Wan was fifty-five, and it was unlikely she would bear another child.
The court eunuchs working in the palace of the deposed empress, who had flogged Lady Wan in a pique of jealousy ten years earlier, appeared at court with a five-year-old boy. According to the story, as the emperor looked into a mirror one day while a eunuch combed his hair, he sighed in regret that he had no son. The eunuch revealed to the emperor the startling news that he already had a son and that he lived hidden in the palace of his first wife, the disgraced Empress Wu.
Since the emperor apparently had not had conjugal relations with the former empress, the eunuchs claimed that the boy had been born to one of her attendants, a woman captured from the Yao nation in the south in 1467. Despite the unusual circumstances, the emperor needed a successor, and he took the boy to Lady Wan. They accepted the boy and officially installed him as imperial heir. The boy’s birth mother then died under unexplained circumstances. Suspicion for the death fell on Lady Wan, but the deed may have just as easily been done by supporters of the old empress, who hoped to control the boy and thus have a return route to influence and power in the court.
Lady Wan and her cadre of eunuchs worked hard to stimulate the sexual interests of the emperor so that he might father more children. The chief eunuch in charge of the central stores scoured the country for stimulants, and in the process he acquired vast amounts of pearls, which were thought to have special reproductive powers. In his capacity as the chief publisher of the empire, he gathered pornography and sexual manuals and had them reproduced in elegant volumes meant to enlighten and motivate the emperor. Lady Wan brought in magicians, Taoist and Buddhist monks, and a diversity of charlatans to perform magical rites to help him. Happily for the court, the emperor fathered seventeen children with five women in a little more than a decade.
He continued to live primarily with Lady Wan, who increasingly spent her time supervising financial issues and managing the office of eunuchs, since they controlled the commerce of the empire. Through them, she oversaw most of the major transactions related to tribute and trade, while ensuring that the imperial monopoly over commodities such as salt was maintained. Just as she served as de facto “wife of the emperor, ” she also became the virtual chief financial officer of the empire.
Too many immediate issues and scandals distracted the Ming officials for them to focus on the long-term concern of Mongols at the border. The problem seemed taken care of. They had repulsed Beg-Arslan’s invasion, and now they were building the wall to keep him out. The expenses posed a problem, but they proved a much less interesting topic than the political and sexual dramas of the court.
Manduhai had not been waiting idly behind the Gobi. She had begun creating alliances with some of the southern Mongols in preparation for her eventual move to unite the two parts of the country. To control the south up to the Great Wall, she needed somehow to dispose of both Beg-Arslan and Ismayil, preferably by killing them, or at least chasing them from the area. Rather than fighting both at once, it would be easier to deal with them one at a time. It is not clear if she managed to lure Ismayil into a temporary alliance or if she merely took advantage of a dispute with Beg-Arslan. No matter what the cause, she prepared to move against Beg-Arslan at a time when Ismayil was conspicuously absent.
One of the largest factions of Mongols living along the Chinese border was the conglomerate of old clans and lineages known as the Three Guards. These were Mongols who stayed behind when the Mongol royal court fled north in 1368, and as implied in their name, they had declared loyalty to the Ming Dynasty and worked as border guards. After eighty years of loyal service, they had rebelled and joined Esen about thirty years earlier, just around the time of Manduhai’s birth in 1448. Since Esen’s death they had operated as free agents, following first one and then another leader while raiding and extorting the Chinese when they could and temporarily serving them when profitable.
The son of one of the main leaders of the Three Guards married one of the two Borijin women whom Manduhai called daughter and who had been closely related to her first husband, Manduul, possibly as daughters or nieces. The other daughter had married Beg-Arslan, but she disappeared after helping the Golden Prince escape. Regardless of whether Manduhai arranged this marriage tie with the Three Guards or not, she took advantage of the relationship. As Beg-Arslan retreated to the west, he found himself geographically farther away from the Three Guards, who were based in the east. Manduhai made her alliance and prepared to deal with Beg-Arslan.
The Mongol chronicles commonly employed personal stories to summarize large-scale events. Thus, the desertion of the Three Guards from Beg-Arslan was presented in terms of a private grudge rather than in political terms. Beg-Arslan fell because of his cruelty and the vengeance it evoked.
According to the story, the Three Guards’ break with Beg-Arslan occurred after a visit from their leader, the same one whose son was married to Manduhai’s so-called daughter. The commander called at Beg-Arslan’s ger one day just as Beg-Arslan was sipping from a bowl of butter soup that he had just cooled. A large pot of the soup boiled on the fire, and smelling the rich aroma of the soup, the visiting commander said that his mouth was “thirsty for its tastiness, ” and he asked for some.
Beg-Arslan set aside the bowl of cool soup and, without the visitor noticing, maliciously poured boiling soup into another bowl, which he handed to the visitor. Having just seen Beg-Arslan gulping from the bowl without difficulty and not realizing the switch in bowls, the thirsty visitor eagerly took a large mouthful of the nearly boiling, greasy liquid.
Mongols pride themselves on their ability to abide both heat and cold; dropping or refusing food as too hot shows unmanly weakness. Spitting food out is an unforgivable insult. According to Carpini’s report on his visit to the Mongol court in the thirteenth century, “If a piece of food is given to anyone and he cannot eat it and he spits it out of his mouth, a hole is made beneath the tent and he is drawn out through the hole and killed without mercy. ”
The visiting commander thought to himself: “If I swallow the soup, my heart will burn. If I spit it out I will be shamed. ” So he pretended that nothing untoward had happened. He held the burning soup in his mouth to let it cool, and in so doing, “the skin of his palate came away and fell off. ”
The commander vowed silently: “Until I die I shall never forget this hate. One day I shall think of it. ”
The story of Beg-Arslan’s cruel disrespect for the commander circulated amid the rumors and stories of the steppe. The Three Guards joined Manduhai Khatun and Dayan Khan, and their first action was to move into the vacuum left by Beg-Arslan’s rout by invading the Ordos. With their allies in control of the Ordos, Manduhai and Dayan Khan at last had the base that they needed south of the Mongolian Plateau, from which they could launch an open attack against Beg-Arslan. Manduhai prepared for Dayan Khan to lead the expedition.
In 1479, when Dayan Khan was about fifteen or sixteen, Manduhai sent him out on his first command. Dayan Khan took “the Chakhar and the Tumed [clans], and assembled them to set out against Beg-Arslan. ”
He first sent a spy out west to locate Beg-Arslan. The man chosen was from the same clan as the Three Guards commander who had been burned. The spy approached the ger of Beg-Arslan under the pretext of being sick and needing medicine. He said to Beg-Arslan: “Alas! When this poor body of mine is peaceful, there is an enemy; when it is in good health, there is sickness. ” Beg-Arslan poured some alcohol in a small silver dish and gave it to him to drink.
The visitor drank it, and then in remembrance of the earlier episode when his kinsman’s palate was burned, the spy put the silver dish inside his deel. “This is a souvenir of my drinking, ” he was quoted as saying, and he probably wanted to bring the stolen trophy as evidence that he had located the right person.
After the man left, Beg-Arslan became suspicious and consulted an oracle, but received an ambiguous response that left him as uncertain as before. Nevertheless, the lack of a clearly good sign from the oracle was cause enough to call for his army to gather. Because the land was dry and supported minimal vegetation, the army had been spread out over a large area, and they did not arrive in time to mount a defense for Beg-Arslan.
When he saw the dust of Dayan Khan’s approaching army, Beg-Arslan raced to his horses and fled with a handful of his guards. Dayan Khan’s soldiers saw him and pursued him. But before the Mongols could overtake Beg-Arslan, he removed his helmet and put it on one of his men in an effort to deceive the attackers, while he fled in the opposite direction from his men.
The Mongol force quickly caught the man in Beg-Arslan’s helmet, but to save himself he pointed out the direction in which Beg-Arslan had fled. “They caught up with Beg-Arslan and seized him, ” according to the Altan Tobci, “and killed him at the depression of the Kiljir. ” With finality, the chronicler recorded: “It is said that salt grew at the place where he was killed. ”
The nomads of the steppe had an ancient tale of the wolf and a boy. The story told of a female wolf finding a human baby boy whose feet had been cut off and who had been abandoned on the steppe to die. The mother wolf nursed the boy back to health, protected him, and reared him. When the boy grew older, there was no one else to love him, so he mated with the wolf. From their offspring descended all the Turkic tribes that spread out from Mongolia. From them arose all the notable Turkic nations of history.
Dayan Khan had been born when his father, Bayan Mongke, was fourteen, but Dayan Khan passed his fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth years without an active marital relationship. Manduhai had either married or, more likely, promised to marry him when she made him khan. The Mongols did not usually make a distinction between engagement and marriage. A betrothed couple was referred to as husband and wife, but the marriage was not official until the groom-to-be completed his bride service. While exempt from the formal bride service, in a sense Dayan Khan was performing it by proving himself capable to fulfill his duties as Great Khan.
Around the year 1480, Dayan Khan and Manduhai took the final step into marriage and began to live together as husband and wife. At this time he was approximately seventeen years old, and she was thirty-three. They had already been together for ten years in a formal relationship as intended spouses. Of course, no mention survives to say when or how their intimate relationship began. Unlike some societies that crush together the marriage and sexual union, even forcing both events into the same day or within a few hours of each other, the Mongols had no such artificial scheduling. Boys and girls became engaged or married as part of a social union, but their physical intimacy remained entirely private and up to their own desire and discretion.
In the many marriages where the wife was older, she led the way with her own sense of timing and appropriateness. Certainly, in the case of Manduhai and Dayan Khan, she most likely set the agenda. Because the wives are biologically more mature than their husbands, they are often ready to bear children as soon as the husband passes through puberty.
Dayan Khan did not become a father until he was nineteen years old; probably most of the young warriors of his age were already fathers by this time. By comparison, the relationship between Dayan Khan and Manduhai, no matter when it began, seemed less hurried and somewhat more mature. In 1482, two years after their marital union, the couple produced twin boys. Over the next twelve years, Manduhai gave birth to eight children, including three sets of twins.
The Mongol mother did not normally take to bed for delivery or recovery, and she was expected to get up to care for the newborn child immediately. A nomadic people, who need to move constantly in search of water and grass for the animals or in flight from human or animal predators, could not afford to allow any members of the community, even a new mother, to remain immobile in bed for long. If Manduhai’s delivery followed common procedure, then immediately after birth the mother scrubbed the infant’s body with wool to clean it.
As she cleaned the baby, the mother usually examined the body carefully, searching for blemishes of the skin or irregularities beneath it. She also looked for the telltale sign that marked all children of the Mongol and Turkic tribes, the blue spot. The spot, which could easily be mistaken for a large bruise by someone unfamiliar with it, appeared clearly at the base of the spine, just at the top of the crack between the buttocks, and after a few years it faded away. For the Mongols, the spot had a nearly sacred significance that marked them clearly and distinguished them from other people. It may have been caused by the blood vessels showing through the very white skin on a place in the body with little fat to obscure the vessels; or perhaps, as they were taught, the Blue Spot marked them as the children of the Eternal Blue Sky. From long interaction with other peoples, the Mongols and Turkic tribes had taken this mark on the child as a distinctive separation that made them special as the Blue Spot People.
Once she cleaned the newborn baby, the mother typically swaddled it tightly in a sheep’s fleece. Most babies spent the first year of life packed snugly into the fleece that, in turn, fit into a portable cradle made of bark, twigs, or leather that fit snugly under the mother’s arm when she needed to go outside the ger. As the child grew a little older, he or she could ride on the saddle in front of the mother and father, carefully protected by the embrace of their two arms and legs. For longer trips, such as moving camp, the parents needed both arms for other tasks, and the young children would be put in a small basket strapped to the side of a camel or horse, as Manduhai had once transported Dayan Khan.
Just as the selection of a reign title for her husband showed Manduhai’s clear political agenda, the names of her children made it even clearer, proclaiming her agenda loudly. She named each of her sons Bolod, “Steel. ” The first two were Toro Bolod and Ulus Bolod, meaning “Steel Government” and “Steel Nation. ”
Manduhai and Dayan Khan now controlled all the Mongols and Oirat north of the Gobi, and south of the Gobi they had the alliance of the eastern and central clans. By 1483, Ismayil had been driven all the way to the Hami oasis at the farthest edge of the Mongol territory, almost where it turns into uninhabitable desert. With his old ally and rival Beg-Arslan removed, he was the undisputed leader of the ragtag army left behind, and at any moment he might choose to attack again. He certainly would not sit idly at Hami pursuing the life of a melon farmer or winemaker. If the Mongols showed any sign of weakness or distraction, he would return.
Ismayil’s presence at Hami served as a constant alternative to the rule of Manduhai and Dayan Khan. It would be hard for them to assert much authority over the southern tribes if they faced the constant threat that those tribes might bolt to Ismayil. He had to be removed.
Of course, Dayan Khan had a much deeper and more powerful reason to go after Ismayil. After being kidnapped by Ismayil nearly twenty years earlier, Dayan Khan’s mother, Siker, was still with him. Hami was located too far across a barren strip between the Gobi and the sand desert to send a large army after Ismayil. There simply would not be enough grass for the animals to get there and return safely. But sometime around 1484, Manduhai and Dayan Khan assembled a select group of men with the mission to bring back Dayan Khan’s mother and to kill or capture Ismayil.
Heretofore Dayan Khan had not expressed much interest in finding his missing mother, but something in him was changing. Now that he was fully grown and had become a father, some new longing awoke in him to connect again with his original family that had been shattered so soon after his birth.
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